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Yaesu G-800S Repair

The Broken POT is repaired and G-800S is brought back to life

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Article Summary

I had a G800-S rotator unused for nearly 5 years. When it was put on service, due to my mistake, I installed it upside-down. Then the water got filled up inside and made the rotator indication somewhat unstable. The indicator moves about 30 deg up and down sometimes by it’s own. This became a problem for me to use it effectively and I decided to open it.

Article Highlights

Kamal Edirisinghe
4S7AB / KA5MAL

Author Sep 2020

Having More than 35 years of experience in the Field of Amateur Radio, I have published many articles in prestigious international publications like, QST, CQ-DL, NCJ, Six-News etc.. Here in this web site, these write-ups are intended to give you knowledge about my designs and projects related to the hobby. The articles about foreign HAM activities are intended to share my experience.

The rotor was opened carefully not to drop the bearings all over the place. The potentiometer is a 500Ohm wire wound type..

The fix was simple and straightforward. I have soldered a 120Ohm resistor to the point where the wire was broken. Then the rotator lost some degree of indication (in my case it lost the overlapping rotation only). So I have 360 degree or slightly more of indication with my rotor which is 100% good enough.

Everything was installed as per the manual (don’t forget to grease the bearings since you opened it). Now it works well.

After opening the backside metalic cap, I found that the higher resistance end side wire was disconnected at about 400Ohm. That was causing all the problems I described above.